Reckoning with the Past, Imagining the Future

Abstract

In the wake of the Trump presidency—with its endemic corruption, norm-breaking, and open subversion of the rule of law culminating in an attempted insurrection and ongoing false claims of election fraud—an overdue national conversation about the health of US democracy is taking place. For many, this was their first conscious experience of US democracy as imperiled or in crisis, and it raised pressing questions about whether there was cause to hope rather than despair, and of what the sources of such democratic faith might be. Black political thought has long grappled with the foundational deficits of US democracy; even as Black activists have worked tirelessly to bring about such alternative futures the persistence of white supremacy has made it difficult to hope in the possibility of radical transformation. Reckoning provides rigorous, complex answers to the question of how to practice democratic hope and refuse despair without trafficking in easy answers or simple prescriptions. According to Woodly, social movements: help members of the polity recover from the cynicism wrought by insufficiently responsive governance. . . . [They] remind us of the power of the public sphere. . . . [They force] governing officials to be responsive to new or neglected constituencies and attentive to their causes. . . . [They] help us to feel that our opinions and political actions matter—that “we the people” have power. . . . [They] make a citizenry both believe and act on behalf of the belief that “another world is possible.” (10)